Elastic fabrics are useful in a variety of applications, including use as a component in bandaging materials, garments, diapers, supportive clothing and personal hygiene products. Incorporating an elastic component into these and other products is desirable because the resultant product can conform to irregular shapes and allow more freedom of body movement than fabrics with limited extensibility.
Elastomeric materials have been incorporated into various fabric structures to provide stretchable fabrics. In many instances, such as where the fabrics are made by knitting or weaving, there is a relatively high cost associated with the fabric. In cases where the fabrics are made using nonwoven technologies, the fabrics can suffer from insufficient strength and only limited durability, stretch and recovery properties.
Elastomers used to fabricate elastic fabrics often have an undesirable rubbery feel. When these materials are used in composite nonwoven fabrics, the hand and texture of the fabric can be perceived by the user as sticky or rubbery and therefore undesirable. The fabric aesthetics can be improved by incorporating synthetic staple fibers, wood pulp, or natural fibers such as cotton into the elastic nonwoven. Care must be taken, however, to combine the elastic filaments with the non-elastic staple fibers so that the entire fibrous mass extends as a unit when the fabric is extended.
Prior procedures have incorporated an elastic net into a nonwoven structure to provide a stretchable nonwoven fabric. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,775,579 to Hagy, et al. discloses desirable composite elastic nonwoven fabrics containing staple textile fibers intimately hydroentangled with an elastic web or an elastic net. One or more webs of staple textile fibers and/or wood pulp fibers can be hydroentangled with an elastic net according to the disclosure of this invention. The resulting composite fabric exhibits characteristics comparable to those of knit textile cloth and possesses superior softness and extensibility properties. The rubbery feel traditionally associated with elastomeric materials can be minimized or eliminated in these fabrics.
Despite the advantages provided by these fabrics and techniques, for some converting processes and end use applications, a fabric having one dimensional stretch, i.e., elastic properties in one of either the machine direction or the cross machine direction, is desirable. In addition, the manufacturing processes associated with prior art fabrics can involve complicated and difficult manufacturing steps, increasing the cost of the fabric and/or decreasing the fabric uniformity. Thus it would also be desirable to provide an elastic fabric at a minimum cost.
U.S. Pat. No. No. 3,485,706 to Evans discloses textile-like nonwoven fabrics produced by traversing fibrous material with high energy liquid streams while supported on an apertured member to consolidate the material in a repeating pattern of entangled fiber regions and interconnecting fibers. In Example 56, a bulky, puckered nonwoven fabric is prepared by hydroentangling polyester staple fibers into a stretched warp of spandex yarn. Upon working the thus formed fabric, however, the staple fibers are mechanically detached from the spandex. That is, the fibers are not firmly anchored into the composite web so that following repeated stretch and relaxation, portions of the staple fiber mass do not follow the extension of the elastic filaments, and the fabric becomes nonuniform in appearance and mechanical performance.